The Best-Laid Offical Plan Of South Frontenac

Jeff Green | Jun 08, 2022

When you get down to it, South Frontenac politicians don't have that many options when it comes to changing the draft Official Plan document that has been presented to them by a team of consultations and their own development/planning department.

The key elements of the plan were discussed at a 3-hour long meeting in late May, and t the end of all that, members of council were given a daunting assignment, to read, digest and comment on the 218 page document, which is a livelier read than a financial audit report, but just barely.

Although they are not looking forward to reading the entire document, members of council have already asked some of the key questions that the entire Official Plan debate have brought to the surface, questions which strike to the heart of a 24 year-old history of steadily rising levels of residential development, which has resulted in the township being able to meet its service target while keeping tax increases to a minimum.

Early on in the meeting, Councillor Ron Sleeth asked a question that kept coming up over the next three hours.

“How are we going to continue to deliver the services the public are demanding, while keeping to a 2% increase.”

Sleeth was referring to the fact that 90% of the growth in the township, over the last 20 years, has taken place on lands designated as rural countryside lots, many of them created by landowners with extra land that they were not using anymore for farming or logging as they had in the past. Landowners are limited in the number of lots they can create, by a rule that was put in place when the first South Frontenac Official Plan was approved in 2000. The number of lots that can be created out of a single parcel of land, whether that parcel is a 20 acre parcel or a 200 acre parcel, is 3. With many property owners having already taken advantage of their 3 lots, the number of available rural lots in the township is now.. The other driver of development is waterfront lots, but those are in even shorter supply.

As municipal politicians like to say, 'they aren't making new lakes'.

The vision for future development in rural Ontario that the provincial government has been pushing for years, is through plans of subdivision on rural lands, or development within th so-called “settlement areas,” i.e. local villages or hamlets.

As Mayor Vandewal pointed out, rural plans of subdivision take 5 to 8 years from the day they are first proposed to the day when lots can be sold, and are an expensive and technical process to undertake.

“Only rich developers are able to do this. A regular property owner in South Frontenac is not able to create a subdivision. It just does not happen,” he said.

One of the proposals in the draft Official Plan, that is intended to encourage growth, is to eliminate the three-lot limit within the “settlement areas.”

But that kind of increased development might not even be environmentally sustainable. A concentration of houses, which are all dependent on their own wells and septic systems, can over-tax a water supply, and create a risk to neighbouring properties, if septic systems fail.

The Village of Sydenham is the only location in South Frontenac that has a public water system. There was great controversy when it was built, but the council of the day had no real choice, because the well water in much of Sydenham was contaminated, and much of that contamination came from over-development on private septic systems. The Sydenham water system did not address that contamination, it persists to this day, it only bypassed it by replacing the water supply for Sydenham residents.

Communities in Eastern Ontario that are seeing large growth, such as Carleton Place, are only able to do so because they have water treatment plants and sewage systems that can be up-scaled to accommodate that growth.

This will not happen in Frontenac County because they are too expensive to build for the size of our villages.

Frontenac County is working on a kind of modular solution called communal servicing, which will make privately owned, small-scale communal water treatment and sewage systems, within a single development, financially viable for developers. If that happens, it may open up options for development throughout Frontenac County, but there are obstacles in the way.

And even if the communal systems approach works, they will not address Ron Vandewal's concern about property development opportunities being available only to rich developers, leaving local property owners out of the loop.

The problem for members of South Frontenac Council is two-fold. They need development to maintain the township's finances, but what has been working until now is not going to work in the future because lots are in short supply and the province is actively pushing against it.

The second problem is that the Official Plan they are working on does not create the kinds of opportunities that their constituents, property owners in the township, are looking for.

One possible solution, which was floated by Ron Sleeth, was to reset the clock from the year 2,000, and allow for 3 new lots to be created out of any suitable land parcel in 2022.

Claire Dodds, the Director of Development Services for South Frontenac, who is overseeing the development of the new Official Plan, poured cold water on that idea.

She said that municipalities that have tried to do that have been blocked by the Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing, which ultimately controls what municipalities can and cannot do.

The Official Plan process in South Frontenac is far from over. Members of council are reading the draft document and sending comments in to township planning staff, and to Dillon Consulting, who prepared the draft document.

It will be discussed by council next week, and a second draft will be prepared and presented to the public for further comment, leading to adoption, likely some time after this fall’s municipal election.

By the end of the meeting on May 24, some members of council were saying that that the most important elements of the plan, those that will affect development in the township, cannot be changed in any meaningful way.

The slow and steady growth and prosperity that the township has enjoyed since it was created, may be over.

The township will either see slowing growth, which is not what any council wants, or an influx of capital from developers whose plans may not fit with the way people, already living in the township, would like to see their communities develop.